Notebook
There IS an interesting connection between two of the arguments now being fought in The Times correspondence columns. The first broke out after the Chief Constable of Manchester, James Anderton, wrote to condemn pornography and to defend the seizure of much offensive material after police raids on porn shops. There came a predictable answer from the egregious John Trevelyan, pur former 'permissive' film censor, but there are signs that the friends of pornography now begin to realise that they were wrong. The second Times argument rages over an article by Bernard Levin who had joined Lord Longford in calling for the release of the 'Moors Murderers', now said to be penitent. As far as I can see, nobody has so far seen the connection between the two arguments. The 'Moors Murders' took place in Manchester and tliey involved the sexual sadistic torture of children as well as the actual killing. According to Mr Anderton, whom I met last week, a great deal of the pornography that his police seized recently, involved sexual practices with children. The John Trevelyans of this world argue that pornography serves as a safety valve to prevent people acting out their fantasies. Normal, intelligent people believe that pornography about sadism to children is likely to lead to crimes of this type which is why the people of Manchester have overwhelmingly applauded Mr Anderton's letter and do not want the 'Moors Murderers' let out of prison.
Each Christmas brings fresh irritation to free-lance or self-employed people, such as myself, who lose precious days of work while the vast mass of the idle employed (as we see it) enjoy longer and longer holidays, paid for, many of them, out of the tax payer's and rate-payer's pocket. Scroogelike, I started the Christmas holiday by complaining as usual that everyone in the country would spend the season sprawled in front of a TV set, only to find that I spent most of Monday and Tuesday sprawled in front of the two-part Russian War and Peace, dragging myself away only to make tea or write a paragraph of this notebook. The immense film is not without moments of bathos, vulgarity, Soviet propaganda and heavenly choirs but at least it aspires to reproduce what Tolstoy was writing about, unlike the atrocious travesties of the book and of Anna Karenina mounted by the BBC. Am I alone in thinking that certain people high in the BBC are not just insensitive to, but actually hate artists like Tolstoy and relish seeing their works brought down to the banality of suburban soap opera? The other day in these columns my colleague Christopher Booker discussed whether Harold Wilson could be compared to Macbeth, with Marcia Williams as Lady Macbeth, egging him on to various follies. I suggest that a closer parallel can be found in Trollope's Barchester Towers, which I was reading recently in South African hotel bedrooms. The new Bishop of Barchester, a man famous for modern ideas in theology and education (white heat of technology, University of the Air etc) is appointed Bishop of Barchester but it soon becomes clear that all real power in the diocese will be held by either his bad-tempered, bullying wife Mrs Proudie, or by the sly, lecherous chaplain Mr Slope. I would not suggest who Mr Slope was in the Wilson administration because he is very litigious. Most shady contemporaries have parallels in the Victorian classics, especially Dickens. There is a close likeness between John Poulson and Mr Pecksniff, the sanctimonious provincial architect who took the credit for buildings designed by bullied and ill-paid underlings. 1 am now reading the Old Curiosity Shop whose villain Quilp, a black-mailing intriguer of somewhat diminutive stature resembles somebody I have read about in Private Eye who is also rather litigious so I will not pursue the parallel any further.
British Airways are locked in dispute with certain East Asian airlines that offer free drinks to tourist as well as first class passengers. Before one begins to praise British Airways for prudence and not wasting public money, one should consult an article on the subject in Business Traveller, written by Bryan Moynihan, a journalist who is by way of being an expert on airline skullduggery. He reveals that opposition to free drinks stems not from the BA management but from the cabin crews, who can earn tidy sums on those long far east flights by selling the free first class drink to the tourist class passengers. This explains why, when you order a miniature bottle of spirits, the steward or stewardess, so often unscrews the top, explaining 'they're very tight, Sir', in order to cover up the fact that the seal is already broken. Articles like this have made Business Traveller one of the most successful and talked about publishing ventures in recent years. Intended for those who travel abroad, especially by air, it is in effect an anti-travel magazine, a corrective to those glossy house organs you find in front of your seat, full of pictures of palmfringed beaches, and unfunny articles by TV comedians.
In his review on another page of Harold's Years, a symposium from the Spectator and New Statesman, Auberon Waugh is more than kind about what I wrote on the last days of Saigon but he does not mention what seemed to me the most serious fault of the anthology: it contains no article by James Fenton, at present the NS Political Correspondent, who must be one of the two or three best journalists writing for either paper. When this was discussed in the pub, somebody said that Fenton was too young to have written during the Harold Wilson era, forgetting that he was also in IndoChina during the last years before Communist victory. He wrote an article from the highlands of Vietnam early in 1975, explaining with almost weird prescience, how they were just about to be over-run and his article on the last days of Phnom Penh, which (like mine from Saigon) gave much offence to the Hampstead Left, also predieted that life under the Khmer Rouge was likely to prove nasty and short.
Gough Whitlam can be blamed for many things but it is not quite fair to deride his work for the arts in Australia. The excellent Australian films Caddi and Picnic at Hanging Rock both received, if 1 am not mistaken, some kind of subsidy from the Australian government which could now be paid back out of the profits. Our own dread ful film industry (patrons: H. Wilson an Lady Talkender) has been destroye thanks to the greed of the unions and th two main producing companies, that als have a virtual monopoly of the cinemas. I d not suggest for a moment that our Ill industry should get a government grant t supplement all the profit it makes from ea parks and Bingo halls but let it be said o Whitlam that on top of the hundreds o millions which he wasted, he spent a f thousand to good effect.
Richard We
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